Saltar para: Post [1], Pesquisa e Arquivos [2]
"OH WATERS, TEEM WITH MEDICINE TO KEEP MY BODY SAFE FROM HARM, SO THAT I MAY LONG SEE THE SUN." - Rig Veda
Gordon Childe’s famous notion of a Neolithic revolution saw the switch from huntingto herding and from gathering to cultivation as the pivotal agent of change. It was amodel subsequently followed by many scholars. Today the imperative is different: noteconomic but cultural and cognitive. Already from about 23 000 years ago, we seegroups of hunter-gatherers in parts of south-west Asia begin to transform their settlementand subsistence strategies and develop large, permanently co-residential communities wellbefore the beginning of agriculture. This new form of social life implies that the cognitiveand cultural faculties of Homo sapiens had become capable of managing cultural systemsthrough external symbolic storage, or monumentality, an essential instrument of socialcomplexity.Having rejected Childe’s model of farming as an adaptation necessitated by climatechange and environmental desiccation, Robert Braidwood asked ‘Why then? Why not
earlier?’ That question has mostly been overlooked, but it applies to the emergence of new,permanent communities as much as to the adoption of farming practices. Braidwood’sprescient hunch was that perhaps culture was not ready (Braidwood & Willey 1962: 332).The answer I propose is: (1) only at a certain point in human cognitive evolution didit become possible for Homo sapiens to transcend certain biological limitations of thehuman brain by cultural means; and (2) this increased mental facility was made necessaryby the reliance on larger and more cohesive social groups, itself a product of homininevolution.
Tags: